Here is fresh proof from a vote in the Senate yesterday that Republicans really took Obama's SOTU message to heart. Republican Senators, after reflecting Soberly and Seriously on what Obama had to say Wednesday night about Democrats and Republicans working together for the sake of the American people.....broke through their bipartisan funk and voted on Pay-Go Thursday morning.

Pay-Go is basically an agreement assuring that legislation is paid for as it's passed.

President Obama is a great communicator. He proved it again in last night's SOTU speech. Transcript here. He knows how to command an audiences's attention. Obama does something else very well....he speaks the truth. He's not duplicitous. People may not agree with him, but he doesn't lie. That's refreshing after the last administration, however, in today's political shredding machine, honesty isn't going to matter much when it comes to solving America's problems.

The President correctly outlined what he inherited from the previous Republican administration.....a one trillion dollar deficit, an 8 trillion dollar national debt and job losses of 700,000 per month. He also explained carefully and correctly what the Recovery Act has accomplished.....2 million jobs saved or created, a national depression-crisis averted.

Above is the face, as doofus-like as it is, of the Great American Tea Bagger, James O'Keefe. Along with foxy-looking Hannah Giles, O'Keefe rose to prominence in WingnutWorld by tricking a couple of ACORN employees into saying potentially damaging stuff on camera. Take a good look ....at the Alfalfa-like face of the boy responsible for getting the U.S Congress and the U.S. President to knee-jerk their knees off defunding ACORN.

I think you might remember, I told you this was going to happen....and just in time for the 2010 election cycle....I'm very much looking forward to the WWM, (WingnutMania-Media) spectaculars this fall.

Upon claiming his Massachusetts senate seat win Tuesday evening, Scott Brown did what many, many other great warrior, truck driving, leaders have done down the corridors of time.....offered up his daughters...

In a Washington Post piece, E.J. Dionne muses about Obama's declining approval numbers and the Massachusetts special election tomorrow to fill Ted Kennedy's vacant senate seat. The piece is worth reading. I'll get to one of his conclusions later in this post.

In the Massachusetts election it looks like the GOP candidate, Scott Brown, just might defeat Democrat, Martha Coakley.......although the race still looks like it's 'too close to call.' A Brown win would eliminate the alleged filibuster proof majority the senate Democrats, at least, have on paper.....and possibly threaten passage of the health care reform legislation Congress worked on most of 2009.

I wasn't going to post on the Harry Reid comment about Obama.....that Obama is "light skinned" and "doesn't have a Negro dialect unless he wants to"..... because there's not much to talk about. Reid, who was praising Obama in his remarks, didn't say anything that wasn't true and didn't mean any of it as a slam on Obama, just the opposite. Given that,....Reid apologized, Obama accepted the apology....end of story, right?

It is said that even a blind pig stumbles onto the occasional acorn under a tree. Maybe.....however, the unknown author of that line probably couldn't have imagined the likes of the blind American power pigs we would be dealing with in the 21st century.

Almost cartoonishly.....check that.....cartoonishly, Republican political opportunists, like Peter King (R-NY), have been chastising President Obama for not using the words "terror" and "terrorist" enough when communicating to the American people.

As soon as Barack Obama was elected in November 2008, corporate media began to mount a campaign meant to bring the tax-cutting Republicans back into power. During all of 2009, corporate media members relentlessly pursued the opinions of out-of-power Republicans. Republican and conservative guests outnumbered Democratic ones on teevee "news" programs. The Sunday shows were dominated by the likes of McCain and Lieberman. Even the oh-so-liberal MSNBC couldn't stop talking about Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin, while repeatedly entertaining the question, "can Republicans come back?"

Conservatives won't agree with any of that because Rush taught them long ago that the media...or as Sister Sarah calls it, "lamestream media",....is just so liberal. That's one of the many false beliefs conservatives cling to like a security blanket. But conservatives haven't been factually correct about much lately....and they are not correct about the media, either. Not even close.

There are sooo many idiots saying so many things on the teevee machine starting out the new year.....that it makes picking a particlur idiot, or a particular crazy something to write about akin to eating at an all-you-can-eat buffet....hard to know where to start.

Short on time? Start viewing at the 3:50 mark. Listen carefully to what Richard Wolfe, a journalist close to the Obama White House, says about why U.S. intelligence personnel may not have shared information which could have stopped the underwear bomber guy prior to boarding planes bound for Detroit.....

The Reverend's take on 2009's most important developments filtered down to two big-picture stories. The Tea Party/Palin "patriot" movement and the Dick & Liz Cheney torture movement. While there is certainly cross-pollination in the two movements....I think, they are separate and distinct.